NEW PARTNERSHIPS
SET TO RESHAPE NASA SCIENCE MODELING
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NASA
is joining with leading university and government researchers to develop software
frameworks that will enable more realistic simulations of natural phenomena and
interpretation of vast quantities of observational data on high-end computers. Over
the next three years, the agency will pay out $22.8 million to 11 investigation
teams attacking challenges as diverse as: - making
it possible for many climate and weather modeling groups to share and reuse each
other's software,
- creating
multi-year earthquake forecasts,
- predicting
space weather using real-time observations, and
- uncovering
the workings of gamma-ray bursts.
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| | | "These
agreements represent a major investment in development of the software infrastructure
that is needed to support high-end computing applications in the Earth and space
sciences," said Dr. Richard Rood, Acting Chief, Earth and Space Data Computing
Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "The applications
are at the forefront of scientific discovery through computational experimentation
and also sit at the foundation of the software codes used to assess climate change."
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3 | | | For
instance, teams led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center will be building
a prototype software infrastructure that will make it possible for the nation's
most widely used climate and weather models and systems for assimilating the latest
observational data to readily operate together. The
partners expect this "Earth System Modeling Framework" to reshape the
national modeling community by vastly reducing the effort researchers must expend
on developing software and by initiating an unprecedented level of cooperation
among leading Earth scientists.
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| | | The
Earth System Modeling Framework will handle all communications among atmosphere,
land, ocean and other models and will enable them to run on a variety of supercomputer
architectures without time-consuming reprogramming. The framework will improve
the fidelity and predictive capability of the models by making it much simpler
for researchers to swap and compare alternative scientific approaches from many
different sources. "This
multi-agency activity is a key part of NASA's contribution to focusing the country's
climate and weather modeling activities on problems of national priority,"
Rood said.
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5 | | | Applications
designed for early adoption of the Earth System Modeling Framework will come from
two additional investigations. A team headed by the University of California,
Los Angeles will enhance coupled model simulations of the El Niño-Southern
Oscillation and its far-flung effects on climate. Another team led by Goddard
researchers will increase climate simulation accuracy by creating and coupling
a land surface model/data assimilation system that captures the Earth's water
and energy cycles in near real-time.
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6 | | | NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the earthquake forecasting team, whose software
will ingest data from Global Positioning System and Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites
into simulations of Southern California's crustal fault interactions. Goddard
directs a second investigation focused on the western United States. The group
will heighten the realism of models predicting how invasive plant species spread
in national parks and wilderness areas.
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| | | The
University of Michigan heads an investigation constructing a Space Weather Modeling
Framework. Solar and interplanetary satellite observations will drive predictions
from linked models that span the distance from the sun's outer atmosphere to the
Earth's upper atmosphere. Frameworks
for simulating astrophysical phenomena will come from teams based at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, who will study star formation and the behavior of
matter in microgravity environments, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
who will grapple with understanding observational data from gamma-ray bursts,
phenomena believed to be the most powerful explosions in the universe.
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8 | | | Encompassing
the entire cosmos, a team led by the California Institute of Technology will deploy
an on-demand image mosaic service for the National Virtual Observatory, an effort
to meld astronomical observations stored in databases across the United States. All
payments to the teams are tied to successful achievement of negotiated milestones.
Funding for the partnerships comes from the Earth Science Technology Office's
Computational Technologies Project, which is dedicated to helping solve agency
mission problems across the Earth, space, and life sciences. The 11 investigations
will transfer the new capabilities to customers at NASA centers and in the wider
science community.
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9 | | | Encompassing
143 researchers at NASA field centers, government laboratories, universities,
corporations, and non-profit organizations, the investigations are as follows:
The
Earth System Modeling Framework *Part
I: Core Development, led by Timothy Killeen, National Center for Atmospheric Research,
Boulder, Colo., $3,781,000
Expected outcome: Software infrastructure
to enable the interoperability and reuse of Earth System Model components on high-end
computing platforms across the Earth modeling community. *Part
II: Modeling Applications, led by John Marshall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, $1,772,000
Expected outcome: Integration of major U.S. climate
and numerical weather prediction models into the Earth System Modeling Framework.
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10 | | | *Part
III: Data Assimilation Applications, led by Arlindo da Silva, Goddard Space Flight
Center, $4,251,000
Expected outcome: Atmospheric and oceanic data assimilation
systems integrated into the Earth System Modeling Framework. Numerical
Simulations for Active Tectonic Processes, led by Andrea Donnellan, Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., $2,208,000
Expected outcome: Multi-year
Southern California earthquake forecast using realistic modeling of crustal fault
interactions based on observational data.
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11 | | | Land
Information Systems, led by Paul Houser and Christa Peters-Lidard, Goddard Space
Flight Center, $1,471,000
Expected outcome: Enable near-real-time, observation-driven
modeling of regional and global terrestrial water and energy cycles for coupled
Earth System Models. Biotic
Prediction: Building the Computational Technology Infrastructure for Public Health
and Environmental Forecasting, led by John L. Schnase, Goddard Space Flight Center,
$1,075,000
Expected outcome: High-performance, landscape-scale modeling
of the changing geospatial distribution of the Earth's living components.
Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics and Tracer Transport, led by C. Roberto Mechoso,
University of California, Los Angeles, $1,200,000
Expected outcome: Earth
System Modeling Framework components for better understanding of the El Niño/Southern
Oscillation. A
High-Performance Adaptive Simulation Framework for Space Weather Modeling, led
by Tamas Gombosi, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, $1,800,000
Expected
outcome: Real-time space weather prediction capability using coupled models driven
by solar and interplanetary observations. A
C++ Framework for Block-Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement Models, led by Phillip
Colella, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif., $1,851,000
Expected outcome: Computational technologies for multi-scale modeling of
astrophysical and microgravity phenomena. Development
of an Interoperability Based Environment for Adaptive Meshes (IBEAM) with Applications
to Radiation-Hydrodynamic Models of Gamma-Ray Bursts, led by Paul Saylor, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, $1,800,000
Expected outcome: Understanding
of observational data from gamma-ray bursts through development of a component-based
parallel framework for astrophysical simulation. High-Performance
Cornerstone Technologies for the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), led by Thomas
Prince, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, $1,500,000
Expected
outcome: Deploying an on-demand astronomical image mosaic service for the NVO. Back
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